Veteran Teachers Are Like A Rooted Tree: Comprehensive Formal Mentoring as a Mitigating Factor for Stress, Burnout, and Attrition for K-8 Public School Veteran Teachers

<p>Teaching is known to be a highly stressful occupation. Experiences of prolonged stress can lead to teacher burnout and attrition. Veteran teacher attrition, primarily teacher migration, negatively impacts students with the greatest needs and does not address antecedent factors driving the pattern of attrition. Comprehensive formal mentoring has been documented as a mitigating factor for stress, burnout, and attrition for new teachers. Although veteran teachers also face several salient causes of stress and burnout, there appears to be very little research on, or programs of, comprehensive formal mentoring designed specifically for veteran teachers. Therefore, this qualitative, phenomenological study explored the perceptions, thoughts, and experiences of veteran teachers who participated in a rarely offered comprehensive formal mentor program. This study involved twenty K-8 public school teachers from six different school districts in the Southern California area. Veteran teachers were defined as those who had a minimum of ten years' experience in the classroom. The findings of this study suggest that comprehensive formal mentoring does address the needs of veteran teachers, may mitigate attrition, and may have sustainability. In addition, this study identifies positive administrative support as a necessary component for the success of comprehensive formal mentoring programs. Implications include changes in policy, suggestions for additional support for veteran teachers, and comprehensive formal mentoring as mitigation of teacher migration in urban, Title 1 school settings.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Education, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Year dc:date.available

2021

Author dc:creator

• Akin, Heidi

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dina Maramba
• Carl Cohn

• burnout
• comprehensive formal mentoring
• stress
• teacher migration
• urban Title 1 school settings
• veteran teachers

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/196

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1215